“It is at a location where either of the energies linger in excess that problems arise. Here there has been much death—death that was unnatural, that was wrought with pain, andfear, and agony. This has resulted in an accumulation of yin. Do you feel it?”
The clouds shifted overhead, shedding a cold white light upon the scene. To the side, something glinted.
“I do. I think I know why,” she said, and pointed.
The cuff of silver lay half buried in dirt. Zen dusted it off, revealing an engraving of a crown with wings. A breeze stirred locks of his hair, twining through the fabric of his páo, as he studied it.
“Elantians,” he said quietly.
But Lan’s attention was drawn by something else. Something so faint, she’d first thought it to be wind.
It was music.
Gods guide her to hear the song of the ocarina,her mother’s imprint had prayed.
She turned sharply, cold spreading through her veins. The sign she’d been searching for. “Someone is playing a song,” she said. The melody was not one she recalled, yet she felt as though she had heard it before, like a half-forgotten dream. “Do you hear that?”
Zen stood, frowning, the silver band dangling from one hand. “No,” he said.
“Listen!” She grasped the fabric of his sleeve, leaning her head in the direction of the song. “That’s an ocarina. Have you heard one before? It sounds like…it sounds like a flute. Not quite.” She closed her eyes and began to tap out the rhythm on Zen’s arm.
She felt his fingers on hers and opened her eyes to meet his. He watched her with a slight crease in his brows. “I do not think I can hear it,” he said slowly.
She shivered. A song only she could hear…The words of the vision she’d had back in the Jade Forest came to her.Hiddenaway behind a Boundary Seal at Guarded Mountain is something that you, and only you, can find.
“I know where to go,” she said.
She started walking, following the music through the deserted streets, houses once full of light and laughter now silent and abandoned to either side of her. An entire village wiped from existence, like so many others across the Last Kingdom. Zen kept close to her, his hand on Nightfire’s hilt.
The disembodied song grew louder, and Lan had the feeling she was somehow finding her way home. The notes struck a responding chord in her heart.
“Look.”
She started as Zen’s voice broke through the trancelike lure of the music. Ahead of them stood a row of silhouettes: pale and tall, arms spread as they swayed in the wind.
Her heart leapt into her throat.
“Those are dove trees, Lan,” Zen said, and she realized she’d grasped a fistful of his sleeve in her sudden fright. As they approached, the illusion of tall white ghosts yielded to the shape of trees in bloom, pale limbs and hair morphing into branches. Bell-shaped white flowers hung from the branches.
Zen paused in front of one of the trees and touched a finger to a flower petal. “Colloquially, they’re also called ‘ghost trees,’ ” he murmured. “They bloom in the summer season. To see one in flower this late in the cycle is…unusual.”
Beyond the dove trees was a stone wall, carmine paint faded, scratched, and peeling in some places. The music drifted over it, summoning her.
“In there,” Lan said.
The gate to the courtyard presented itself in a gap between the line of dove trees standing like sentries outside the walls. This had once been a prestigious house with all the details offortune and feng’shui carefully considered and rendered in its architectural design. Heavy vermilion doors stood beneath an arch decorated with stone carvings of the Four Demon Gods—tiger, dragon, phoenix, and tortoise—encircling a placard that read:Yòu Quán Pài.
Zen drew a sharp breath. “The School of Guarded Fists,” he whispered. “This is where it was all along?”
She glanced at Zen. He looked pale in the moonlight, a figure cut neatly in monochrome, those black-fire eyes wide with reverence.
Lan knew that the School of the White Pines was the only of the Hundred Schools to have survived the Conquest. Even so, seeing with her own eyes what had once been a place of prestige and power fallen to such ruin hit differently.
Lan looked at the faded courtyard house. She had the impression of time flowing backward, the story of fallen grandeur reversing itself as the slashes on the doors stitched together again, the scars on the walls smoothed out, and the rubble littering the gates disappeared.
As she stepped forward, the twelve cycles she had put between her and her mother’s words seemed to vanish. She might have been six cycles old again, filled with the courage to hope for a future. A destiny.
She reached for the door knockers, a pair of bronze lion heads. The gates didn’t budge. “Locked,” she said.
